Can you explain Proxy Pattern?

Proxy fundamentally is a class functioning as in interface which points towards the actual class which has data. This actual data can be a huge image or an object data which very large and can not be duplicated. So you can create multiple proxies and point towards the huge memory consuming object and perform operations. This avoids duplication of the object and thus saving memory. Proxies are references which points towards the actual object.

Figure ‘Proxy and actual object’ shows how we have created an interface which is implemented by the actual class. So the interface ‘IImageProxy’ forms the proxy and the class with implementation i.e. ‘clsActualImage’ class forms the actual object. You can see in the client code how the interface points towards the actual object.

Figure: - Proxy and actual object

The advantages of using proxy are security and avoiding duplicating objects which are of huge sizes. Rather than shipping the code we can ship the proxy, thus avoiding the need of installing the actual code at the client side. With only the proxy at the client end we ensure more security. Second point is when we have huge objects it can be very memory consuming to move to those large objects in a network or some other domain. So rather than moving those large objects we just move the proxy which leads to better performance.